This is very interesting. Archeology has always contended that it took the agricultural revolution to allow us to settle long enough to create temples and complex neolithic societies, but this finding throws that out of whack. Judging by evidence at this archaeological dig, at least for this particular neolithic society, it was the need to settle in an area to erect a temple to whatever God/Gods they worshiped was the catalyst for the settlement of an area.

A small distance away they are finding the oldest known domesticated wheat, and enclosures for livestock, all after the building of the temple. I wonder if this is the exception, or maybe have we had it wrong all along and it took religion, not the agricultural revolution to create complex societies? Maybe if a more precise dating method is discovered, we might actually find that temples predate cities for most of the neolithic societies.

This is intresting, but it looks like from the description this place was ideally suited to feed a human population, the wild grain and sheep. If they had a stable food source they could have had the time to build relgious sites. Which is what people always thought agriculture had supplied.

If they found stable food, and then developed agriculture to suistain greater numbers of people it dons't change the beleived order that things developed in by much.

I disagree. The temple was fully built BEFORE, according to the article, 1000 years before. That's quite a few generations before, so I would say this changes everything. Science says the agricultural revolution was what allowed people to settle in an area long enough to build temples, but according to the person at this dig, people with stone and flint tools built the temple first, then 1000 years later settled around it. Here is a quote from the article.

" But, Peters and Schmidt say, Gobekli Tepe's builders were on the verge of a major change in how they lived, thanks to an environment that held the raw materials for farming. "They had wild sheep, wild grains that could be domesticated—and the people with the potential to do it," Schmidt says. In fact, research at other sites in the region has shown that within 1,000 years of Gobekli Tepe's construction, settlers had corralled sheep, cattle and pigs. And, at a prehistoric village just 20 miles away, geneticists found evidence of the world's oldest domesticated strains of wheat; radiocarbon dating indicates agriculture developed there around 10,500 years ago, or just five centuries after Gobekli Tepe's construction.

To Schmidt and others, these new findings suggest a novel theory of civilization. Scholars have long believed that only after people learned to farm and live in settled communities did they have the time, organization and resources to construct temples and support complicated social structures. But Schmidt argues it was the other way around: the extensive, coordinated effort to build the monoliths literally laid the groundwork for the development of complex societies. "